Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 86

The advent of crack intensified the sexual degradation of women (Maher, 1995) and resulted in an intensive and “successful” media and criminal legal system “campaign” against primarily poor, African American women replete with racist, sexist, and classist caricatures and misinformation about crack and its consumers (S. C. Boyd, 1999, 2004; Humphries, 1999; Maher, 1997, 2004). Maher’s (1997) classic ethnographic fieldwork with women crack users in the early 1990s in three Brooklyn (New York) neighborhoods reports that income generation within the street-level economy falls into three overlapping and interdependent options: drug-business hustles, nondrug hustles, and sex work. Maher reports that “sex work was the only income-generating activity consistently available to women drug users” (p. 130), and given the risks of “death, rape, and disfigurement” that the sex work entailed, “suggests that overall these women had few [income-generating] choices indeed” (p. 189). Similarly, Erickson and colleagues’ (2000) study of women on crack reported how the women’s addictions “magnified their extreme vulnerability arising from conditions of poverty, arrest histories, loss of family, exposure to violence, and histories of sexual abuse” (p. 769). Both studies (Erickson et al., 2000; Maher, 1997), however, resist simplistic characterizations of these women. Maher (1995) challenges the research presentation of female drug users as “innocent” and “hapless victims,” often lured into both drug use and sex work. “Such accounts perpetuate stereotypical images of women as weak and submissive; as incapable of exercising agency and unable to make any kind of choice in relation to drug use” (p. 132). Erickson and colleagues (2000) note most of these women did not see stopping crack use as an option, and most did not identify their addiction as a problem. Rather, crack was what made their lives bearable or interesting, and sex was the means to smoking crack.

Claire E. Sterk (1999) offers one of the most detailed and comprehensive studies of crack-using women in her ethnographic research on 149 active crack-using women. Her book Fast Lives describes far more variation among these women than is reported in other studies. Sterk identified four categories of crack-using women. Her first category, queens of the scene, had the highest status and the most control over their lives (relative to other crack-cocaine-using women) due to their ability to cook powder cocaine to form crack. Such cooking skills (the irony of this gendered job was not lost on the women) allowed these women access to the upper- and mid-level dealers, who also protected them. In addition to the “queens,” Sterk’s three other categories of women crack cocaine users were the hustlers, who “work” as criminals but not sex workers to support their habits (e.g., stealing cars, pickpocketing, etc.); the hookers, who use sex work (prostitution) to support their habits; and the older struggling rookies, who had no history of drug-using or other illegal activities until their 30s (or later) and were typically unemployed, concerned with social approval, and introduced to crack cocaine by their children. Sterk also reports that the existing research and media representations portraying crack cocaine as an aphrodisiac are misleading in the sense that for both men and women over time, the crack addiction and work to support the addiction result in decreased sexual activity.